Alpha and Omega
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the
last, the beginning and the end. (Rev. 22:12)
At the start of Denis Villeneuve’s alien-encounter movie, Arrival, a linguist named Dr. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) is grieving the death of a teenaged daughter who, we eventually discover, hasn’t even been born yet. Dr. Banks labors through much of the film to decipher the intricate mandala-like writing of seven-limbed creatures who arrive one day from another world. Their spaceships resemble gigantic upended cucumbers hovering just above the ground at a dozen landing sites around the world. Dr. Banks makes little headway trying to understand their spoken language, which sounds a bit like hippopotamuses gargling. She has more luck with the written language, which she classifies as “nonlinear orthography,” meaning that it is structured in such a way that a thought is not expressed sequentially from start to finish. On the principle that form follows function, their writing appears as circles that might have been executed by a Zen calligrapher. In effect, it circles back on itself endlessly. Dr. Bates wonders, “Do they think like that, too?”
As she becomes more proficient in decoding the language of the septapods (meaning “seven-footed creatures”), Dr. Banks finds her own thoughts gradually being recast in the mold of a non-sequential language that bends the arrow of time into a pretzel. She begins remembering things that haven’t happened yet, like the death of her daughter. In “Story of Your Life,” the short story by Ted Chiang that is the basis for the film, Dr. Banks learns from the physicist who will soon become her husband, that the fundamental laws of physics are time-symmetric. There is no essential difference between past and future. What sets humans and septapods apart is that humans experience time sequentially, while septapods take it in all in at once. The child that Dr. Banks and her physicist husband bring into the world is named Hannah, a palindrome expressing a symmetrical understanding of time because it reads the same forward or backward.
The story and film are an exploration of a linguistic theory known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that our view of reality is largely determined by the distinctive thought patterns of our own language and culture. Benjamin Whorf, the theorist most closely identified with this hypothesis, based his conclusions on a careful structural analysis of certain Native American languages whose underlying concepts of time and space are radically different from our own. For example, the Hopi language has no concept of time at all as we understand it. There are no words for it or even a grammatical structure that segments actions into past, present and future. Time, for the Hopis, is a purely subjective experience of things getting later. They can account for events that are not occurring right here and now, but they do so largely without reference to time or space.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has never gained wide acceptance among linguists, largely because there is no real way to prove that people who speak radically different languages are experiencing the world in fundamentally different ways. Things get later for the Hopis, just as they do for speakers of Indo-European languages, even if they have no grammar to mark sequential time. Certainly it would be a stretch to imagine that mastering a language with a nonlinear orthography would enable you to remember the future.
Trying to put words to a concept like time poses challenges because it has no physical attributes and is not directly detectable by any of our five senses. (Just try to picture what is actually passing when we say that time passes.) Scientists talk about the arrow of time, but time doesn’t really have a spatial dimension. We don’t actually move forward or backward in time; those are metaphors. We might just as easily talk about time moving backward into the future, as the Aymara Indians do in South America. The aborigines in the Pormpuraaw community of Australia say that time moves from east to west, like the sun. For Mandarin speakers, time moves vertically. If we can’t agree on something as basic as the direction in which time moves, who’s to say that it moves at all?
But how do we account for our sense that things are getting later, as the Hopis might express it? Is time anything more than our memory of prior events superimposed on our experience of what is happening right now? St. Augustine and Emmanuel Kant regarded time as an attribute of mind rather than of the world. According to theorist Peter Lynds, “It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us.” We might assume the Hopi language is lacking something because it has no grammar or vocabulary to account for the passage of time. But maybe they have no words for it because time, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.
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